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| Jackie Robinson |
Today is the 64th anniversary of Robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier. Ceremonies will be held honoring the iconic player across MLB stadiums today and players will wear his famed No. 42.
Robinson played his first major league game at Ebbets Field for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. Roughly half of the fans in attendance that day were black.
Sixty-four years later, the complexion of the game has changed drastically, but the percentage of black players remains low, according to the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports.
African-American players represented 9.1 percent of total players on the 2010 Opening Day season rosters. (In 1995, roughly one in five major leaguers were African-American.) Though baseball scored high marks for racial diversity in its hiring practices, the latest data indicate a steady rise among black players might be years away, the study concluded.
"Jackie Robinson's dream was to see more African-Americans playing, coaching and in the front office," said Richard Lapchick, who led the study. "It has been ironic that as the role of people of color dramatically increases regarding who runs the game, African-American players decreased for almost 15 years."
Still, at the start of the 2010 season, the total players of color were 40.2 percent - just shy of MLB's record high of 40.6 percent in the 2008 season.
After breaking the color barrier, Robinson went on to become the National Rookie of the Year in 1947 and was a six-time All-Star.
He would later become an important voice in the civil rights movement. He died in 1972.
